... from the point of view of a man alienated from his source, creation arises from despair and ends in failure. But such a man has not trodden the path to the end of time, the end of space, the end of darkness, and the end of light. He does not know that where it all ends, there it all begins...

The Politics of Experience - R.D. Laing

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

How I Tamed the Voices in My Head

Eleanor Longden, 25, started hearing voices when she was a teenager. But, contrary to the usual perception of inner voices, Longden says hers weren’t destructive: “It was rather mundane, simply giving me a narration of some of the day-to-day things I was doing. In many ways, the voice was companionate because it was reminding me that I was carrying on with my responsibilities despite feeling so sad inside. There was something constructive about it.”

People like Longden who admit to hearing inner voices can generally expect two outcomes: a diagnosis of insanity, and potent medication. But a group of psychiatrists and psychologists believe it’s time we reconsidered labels such as schizophrenia and the drugs used as treatment. In fact, they believe we should get people to listen to, and actually engage with, the voices inside their heads.

Longden believes her biggest mistake was in telling a friend she was at university with about her experiences. “I explained that the voices were actually quite positive, but she was horrified and insisted I see a psychiatrist, who ignored my unhappiness and homed in on the voice, assuming it meant I had no sense of normality. For example, I was quite involved with the university television station, and the psychiatrist stated in her notes that I had delusions of being a broadcaster. The second time I saw her, she suggested that I admit myself to hospital for three days for tests.”

Three days turned into three months, during which time Longden was told that if she left, she’d be sectioned and forced back. The drugs she was coerced into taking did little except cause weight gain, and the terrifying label of schizophrenia she was given was, Longden believes, directly responsible for the arrival of 12 very hostile inner voices.

Like most multiple-voice hearers, Longden says one voice was dominant. “He was demonic, and had a visual manifestation of a huge grotesque figure swathed in black. His threats were graphic and violent. The other voices, which were less clear, would back him up.”

Dr Rufus May, a clinical psychologist, says the aim of getting people to connect with their voices is to enable them to incorporate them into their daily lives so they are not distressing. “Voices themselves are not a problem; it’s people’s relationship with them that’s important. So, rather than voices being something that we should avoid at all costs - the traditional psychiatric view - we should be trying to get people to face them, understand them and work with them.”

As if this wasn’t enough, back at university Longden found herself the victim of a bullying campaign. “People had heard about where I’d been and within a week, my door in the halls of residence had been defaced, and I was spat at. I started to self-harm. The worst instance was in the student bar when a group of people asked me to stub a cigarette out on my forearm. When I did it, they cheered.”

Longden became suicidal and was sectioned. After seven weeks back in hospital, she went to stay with her parents in Bradford, where she continued to self-harm and her voices were louder than ever. Her psychiatrist told her it would almost have been better if she’d had cancer because it would be easier to cure.

Finally, the breakthrough came. “Everyone had treated me with this total lack of hope, and as completely passive. But then I was put in touch with a psychiatrist who asked me what I thought would help me. When I said I felt I could deal with the voices better when my mind was clear, he supported me to reduce the medication. Better still, he suggested that I engage with the voices because they probably had a symbolic meaning that might help me recover.”

Longden began to recognise her voices as a representation of unconscious feelings of self-loathing. This helped her to fear them less. “If they were metaphorical, it stood to reason they couldn’t have any control in the external world,” she says.

The psychiatrist encouraged her to talk back to them. “I began to question them, and their replies gave me great insight into my subconscious feelings - enormously helpful in my therapy - and then I started negotiating with them. Sometimes I’d say to the dominant one, ‘I’ll only talk to you after EastEnders,’ and he’d agree!”

Three years on, Longden is off medication. She says she’s happy, and is studying for a doctorate in clinical psychology. Although her voices sometimes return, she feels in complete control of them. “I see them as useful - almost like a stress barometer. My mum’s clue to feeling stressed is a migraine; mine is the voices.”

Dr Rufus May, a clinical psychologist, says the aim of getting people to connect with their voices is to enable them to incorporate them into their daily lives so they are not distressing. “Voices themselves are not a problem; it’s people’s relationship with them that’s important. So, rather than voices being something that we should avoid at all costs - the traditional psychiatric view - we should be trying to get people to face them, understand them and work with them.”

May says negative voices can be turned into a positive experience. “If a voice is telling someone to kill themselves, that could be signifying rage. So the voice-hearer could say, ‘Thanks for flagging this up. I’m not going to take you literally, but you’ve shown me there are things I need to change about me.’”

He even talks to his patients’ voices himself. “I ask the person to tell me verbatim what each voice is saying. I’ll ask questions such as, ‘How long have you been in Mary’s life?” and ‘Why did you come along?’ Sometimes, they’ll tell me something about the person they themselves are unaware of. After all, we’re dealing with the subconscious here.”

May recalls one man, Edward, whose voice told him to build a time machine. “I asked this voice - via Edward - why. It transpired that Edward felt responsible for his brother’s death and wanted to go back and change it. We were able to address that and Edward began to realise he wasn’t responsible.”

Such responses may even be life-saving opportunities. May cites the case of John Barrett who, having walked out of a secure hospital unit, stabbed a retired banker in 2004 after hearing voices in his head. “It seems to me that people didn’t work meaningfully with his voices. He’d had a violent childhood, so his voice could have represented his father.”

May is now involved in training mental health professionals in helping people who hear voices. “Conventional training goes deep, but it helps that I have a high profile,” he says. In fact, he doesn’t advocate that all voice-hearers take this route. “But if you catch people early, or other approaches haven’t worked, it can work very well.”

Some professionals - such as Richard Bentall, professor of experimental clinical psychology at Manchester University - go further, stating that medications should be avoided wherever possible. “They have high costs in terms of side-effects, some life-threatening. Antipsychotic drugs, in particular, can produce stiffness, tremors, involuntary movements, massive weight gain and increased risk of heart attacks and diabetes,” he says.

What’s more, research estimates that about half of patients given drugs don’t get an adequate therapeutic response. “Add to this the fact that they are given a label like schizophrenia - which has no scientific meaning, and is deeply stigmatising - and it’s little wonder that voice-hearers are given such little hope. The bottom line is that we need to stop trying to cure people, and liberate them instead.”

Professor Marius Romme, a psychiatrist, adds that many inner voices can be unthreatening and even positive. “They may try to comfort, congratulate, guide or reassure. It’s wrong to turn this into a shameful problem that people either feel they have to deny or to take medication to suppress.”

Romme’s work was instrumental in the formation of the Hearing Voices Network, an education and self-help registered charity for voice-hearers. Jacqui Dillon, who chairs the network, says:"We call inner voices - or indeed visions - messengers, because they give strong signals into people’s mindsets.”

The network has a growing professional following, Dillon says. “We get a lot of referrals from psychiatrists nowadays, although there’s still a long way to go.”

Talking heads

Studies have found that between four and 10 per cent of Britons hear voices.

Between 70 and 90 cent of people who hear voices do so following traumatic events.

Voices can be male, female, without gender, child, adult, human or non-human.

People may hear one voice or many. Some people report hearing hundreds, although in almost all reported cases, one dominates above the others.

Voices can be experienced in the head, in the ears, outside the head, in some other part of the body, or in the environment.

Voices often reflect important aspects of the hearer’s emotional state - emotions that are often unexpressed by the hearer.

The “hearing voices movement” has spread across the world. There are groups in countries as far afield as Australia, Finland, Japan and Palestine.

4 comments:

I am very pleased to have found your blog. I myself hear voices, and have been slugging my way "through" them for the past six years. I recently started a blog as well, about my own experiences -- it's at www.myschizophrenia.org/blog/. I also created the parent web site, as a project to close the gap between psychiatry, consumers, the public, and available info. It's brand new, so some things like the forum haven't launched yet. The blog about Taming the Voices and Dr. May's opinion about psychotherapy for voices, in particular caught my attention -- I wrote a similar entry, although my own opinion is contrary to Dr. May's, on my blog called "Psychotherapy for My Fairies". I would be delighted to link up with your blog, via blog roll link, because I believe we share a common intention, and hope that you might find my blog useful as well. I can be reached at stephanie@myschizophrenia.org. Best, Stephanie

Thank you so much for what you are doing- for all of it. I was labeled a schizophrenic and directly after my diagnosis, it seemed as if everyone stopped trying to help me. It was as if the entire psychology world had thought, "Well, our job here is done." They then persisted in pushing pills on me when I was strongly against taking any medication. I knew there had to be some people like you guys out there. You have really given me hope. I now understand that I should not in fact be working to "cure my illness" but live my life in my unique way. It's pleasantly suprising to hear for once that there is not something wrong with me that needs to be fixed. I am now looking forward to my therapy session- and giving them all a piece of my- er, out- minds :)

This is me right now, i am 19, alot know me out in this world, has been religiously charactered too , importantly as a mythology, how stupid i am with this? it doesn't seem too bad, lose perspective really got me though, i was never really in perspective in growing up, i skate and i am a gangster, watch television, not too much talking , i talk too much now , my thoughts are developed, first time i smoked weed once these voices sarted were demonic, now i see a change in the color , thins zone out, i get a projected senses of things, i am tryingto get sober at the same time, at the first time i heard these voices it told me to get sober ...

This is a wonderful article and it backs up something I had been thinking about recently. I'm a long time admirer of R. D. Laing and have experienced a lot of mental illness in my life - depression, bipolar disorder, OCD. One of the things which helped me find my way out of these problems was to see the delusions I had when in a psychotic breakdown as symbolically meaningful. I remembered them after I was back on an even keel and used them as a guide on my path to healing. So it occurred to me recently that, rather than using medication to block out voices, it might be better to listen to them and decipher their meaning. It makes sense that negative voices could be an internalisation of the negative "vibes" we pick off of people who don't accept us. I never heard voices, but I have a friend who does. My general ideas about finding freedom from psychological suffering I have written up in a free ebook called How to Be Free which has been receiving a very positive response (168 five star reviews on U.S. I-Tunes). I have a link to this site from my blog and it was one of the fans of my book who alerted me to this article. You can find my blog here : www.howtobefree-theblog.blogspot.com/

About Me

I am an individual who has undergone a transformative experience that in this culture and setting would be identified as psychosis or schizophrenic. Other cultures and settings have other names for the same experience: kundalini awakening, shamanism, mysticism, gnosis, the psychotic-visionary episode, the dark night of the soul, ego death, the alchemical process, positive disintegration, post traumatic stress disorder with psychotic features, spiritual emergency, etc.
I was not on any form of spiritual path previous to that experience nor was I experimenting with ethnogens. I was simply an individual in a great deal of pain doing my best to get through it.
That experience lasted approximately six weeks. I was guided through it by a mentor figure who appeared and served as my constant companion.
Everything in this blog has been researched after the fact. I share it for the benefit of others who may have no framework for interpreting their own psycho-spiritual crisis.